2. Assemble and hearken . . . hearken. It is a common convention of biblical poetry to begin with a formal exhortation for those addressed to listen closely. What is slightly odd about the opening line here is that “hearken” is repeated in the second half of the line instead of introducing a synonym like “give ear” (compare the beginning of Lamech’s poem, Genesis 4:23).

3. first yield of my manhood. The word for “manhood,” ʾon, means “vigor,” but it is particularly associated with male potency. “First yield,” rei’shit, is a word also used for crops. The biological image of Reuben as the product of Jacob’s first inseminating seed sharpens the evocation in the next line of his violation of his father’s concubine.

4. you’ll no more prevail. The verb here may rather mean “you’ll not remain” (or pun on that meaning)—a reference to the early disappearance of the tribe of Reuben, perhaps before the period of the monarchy.

the place where your father lay. The plural form used, mishkevei ʾavikha, has an explicitly sexual connotation, whereas the singular mishkav can also mean simply a place where one sleeps.

you profaned my couch, you mounted. The translation here emends ʿalah (“he mounted”) to ʿalita (“you mounted”), though there is some possibility that the archaic poetic style permitted this sort of abrupt switch in pronominal reference.

5. their trade. The meaning of mekheroteyhem is highly uncertain. The translation here conjecturally links the term with the root m-kh-r, “to sell.”

6. let me never set foot. Literally, “let my person not come.”

their assembly my presence shun. The Hebrew says literally, “in their assembly let my presence not join,” but this is clumsy as English, and in any case the point is that Jacob is ostracizing the two brothers.

they tore down ramparts. With many critics, the translation here reads shur, a poetic term for “wall,” instead of shor, “ox,” as the Masoretic Text has it. The verb, if it refers to oxen, would mean “to maim” or “to hamstring.” It was sometimes the ancient practice to hamstring the captured warhorses of an enemy, but it would have been foolish to hamstring captured oxen, which could be put to peaceful use. Moreover, since Jacob is speaking of the massacre at Shechem, the narrative there explicitly noted that the cattle and other livestock were carried off, not maimed.

8. Judah, you, shall your brothers acclaim. This line in the Hebrew is a fanfare of sound-play, including a pun on Judah’s name, Yehudah, ’atah yodukha ʾaʾekha. Up to this point, Jacob’s testament to his first three sons has actually been nothing but curses. Rashi neatly catches the transitional force of “Judah, you . . .” when he notes, “Inasmuch as he had heaped condemnations on the previous ones, Judah began to back away and his father called to him with words of encouragement, ‘Judah, you are not like them.’” Judah now displaces the three brothers born before him, and his claim to preeminence (“your brothers acclaim”) is founded on his military prowess (“your hand on your enemies’ nape”). All this has a distinctly Davidic coloration. “Acclaim” is a more precise equivalent for the verb in context than the usual “praise” because what is involved is recognition of Judah’s royal status.

9. from the prey, O my son, you mount. Amos Funkenstein has astutely suggested to me that there is an ingenious double meaning here. The Hebrew could also be construed as “from the prey of my son you mounted,” introducing a shadow reference to Judah’s leading part in the plan to pass off Joseph as dead. When the bloodied tunic was brought to Jacob, he cried out, “Joseph is torn to shreds” (tarof toraf), and the term for “prey” here is teref.

you mount. This is the same verb that is used above for Reuben’s act of sexual violation, but here it refers to the lion springing up from the prey it has slain. The proposal that the verb means “to grow” is forced, with little warrant elsewhere in the Bible.

the king of beasts. This English kenning is necessary in the poetic parallelism because there are no English synonyms for “lion,” whereas biblical Hebrew has five different terms for the same beast.

10. mace. The Hebrew meḥoqeq refers to a ruler’s long staff, a clear parallel to “scepter.” There is no reason to construe it, as some have done, as a euphemism for the phallus, though the image of the mace between the legs surely suggests virile power in political leadership.

that tribute to him may come. This is a notorious crux. The Masoretic Text seems to read “until he comes to Shiloh,” a dark phrase that has inspired much messianic interpretation. The present translation follows an exegetical tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, which breaks up the word “Shiloh” and vocalizes it differently as shai lo.

11. He binds to the vine his ass. The hyperbole has been explained most plausibly by Abraham ibn Ezra: “The yield of his vineyards will be so abundant that his ass can turn aside to the vine and he won’t care if it eats the grapes.” This explanation jibes nicely with the next image of washing garments in wine—the wine will be so plentiful that it can be treated as water.

the blood of the grape. This vivid poetic epithet for wine, with its intensifying effect, is reminiscent of the Ugaritic kenning for wine, “blood of the tree,” and hence a token of the stylistic antiquity of the poem.

12. O eyes that are darker than wine. The Hebrew, like this English version, gives no pronoun references for these striking images, though they presumably refer to Judah, whose descendants will flourish in beauty in the midst of their viticultural abundance. The word for “darker,” ḥakhlili, is still another rare poetic term, cognate with the Akkadian elelu, “to be dark.”

14. hearths. The term occurs only here and in Judges 5:16. Because of the pastoral setting of the latter text, it is frequently construed as “sheepfolds,” a meaning it seems to have in Judges 5:16, but the verbal stem from which it appears to derive means “to set a pot on the fire.”

16. Dan, his folk will judge. Dan has always been construed as the subject of the verb “judge” (or “govern”), not its object. But Hebrew grammar makes it equally possible to read “Dan” as object of the verb, and that would explain the otherwise obscure second clause: in historical fact, the tribe of Dan, far from assuming a role of leadership, was obliged to migrate from south to north. Despite its marginal existence, the Israelite people will judge or govern it as one of Israel’s tribes.

17. Let Dan be a snake on the road. The sudden lethal attack from below on the roadside is an image of the tactic of ambush in guerilla warfare adopted against invaders by the Danite fighters. Again, the image suggests that this tribe, unlike the others, did not enjoy the security of fortified settlement.

19. Gad shall be goaded by raiders. The sound-play in the Hebrew is gad gedud yegudenu.

yet he shall goad their heel. The phrase may be a reminiscence of “and you shall boot him with the heel,” which is addressed to the serpent in the Garden (3:15). There would be a carryover, then, from the snake imagery of the preceding lines. The snake, one should keep in mind, is not “demonic” but an image of darting, agile, lethal assault.

20. Asher’s bread. The Masoretic Text reads “from Asher, his bread,” but several ancient versions, quite plausibly, attach the initial consonant mem (“from”) to the end of the preceding word ʿaqev (“heel”), turning it into “their heel.”

21. lovely fawns. The Hebrew ʾimrei shafer is in doubt. The translation follows one prevalent conjecture in deriving the first word from the Aramaic ʾimeir, which usually means “lamb.”

22. A fruitful son. The morphology of the reiterated noun in this line is so peculiar that some scholars have imagined a reference to branches, others to a wild ass. There is little philological warrant for the former, and the connection between the term used here, porat, and pereʾ, “wild ass,” seems strained. (The main argument for the wild ass is that it preserves the animal imagery, but there are several other tribes in the poem that have no animal icons.) A link between porat and the root p-r-h, “to be fruitful,” is less of a grammatical stretch, and is encouraged by Joseph’s play on that same root in naming his son Ephraim. Joseph and Judah, as the dominant tribes of the north and the south respectively, get far more elaborate attention in the poem than do any of their brothers.

daughters strode. This is another crux because the verb “strode” appears to be in the feminine singular. But there are good grounds to assume that the verbal suffix ah, which in normative grammar signals third-person feminine singular perfect tense, was also an archaic third-person plural feminine form. There are a number of instances in which the consonantal text (ketiv) shows this form with a plural subject and the Masoretes correct it in the qeri (the indicated pronunciation) to normative grammar: e.g., Deuteronomy 21:7, “Our hands did not shed [ketiv: shafkhah] this blood.” Without emendation, then, the text suggests that Joseph has the twin blessing of fruitfulness and military security. The young women of the tribe can walk in safety alongside the rampart because they will be protected by Joseph’s valorous skill in battle (verses 23–24).

by a rampart. This is the same word as the one at the end of verse 6. There is scant warrant for extending it metonymically to “hillside,” as some translators have done.

24. taut was his bow, / his arms ever-moving. There is some doubt about “taut,” though the context makes this a reasonable educated guess. There is also some dispute over the verb represented here as “ever-moving,” but its likely literal meaning is “to move about rapidly,” “to be nimble.”

through the hands. This picks up the previous phrase, referring to Joseph, which is literally, “the arms of his hands” (unless “of his hands” is a scribal slip, a dittography of the next word in the text). In any case, the idea is that the hands of the human warrior are given strength by God’s hands.

through the name. Along with some of the ancient versions, the translation here reads mishem for the Masoretic misham, “from there,” which is obscure.

25. blessings of breasts and womb. The fertility of the female body is aligned with the fertility of creation, the heavens above and the deep below—a correspondence not lost on the bawdy fourteenth-century Hebrew poet Emanuel of Rome, who exploited this verse in an erotic poem.

26. the blessings of timeless heights, / the bounty of hills everlasting. The Masoretic Text is not really intelligible at this point, and this English version follows the Septuagint for the first part of the verse, which has the double virtue of coherence and of resembling several similar parallel locutions elsewhere in biblical poetry. Instead of the Masoretic Text’s horai ʿad (“my forebears” [?] “until” [?]), the Septuagint has the equivalent in Greek of the idiomatic harerei ʿad (“timeless heights”). The noun taʾawat that immediately follows may also reflect a defective text, but it could mean “that which is desired,” hence, “bounty” or “riches.” The apparent sense of the whole line is: the blessings granted Joseph and his fathers will be even greater than the blessings manifested throughout time in the natural world, as seen in the verdant, fruit-bearing hillsides.

the brow. The Hebrew is actually a poetic synonym for “head” (something like “pate”), but “brow” is used here for the sake of the English idiom of blessings, or honors, resting on that part of the anatomy.

27. Benjamin, ravening wolf. The last brief vignette of the poem, for the youngest of the twelve sons, is one of its sharpest images of death-dealing animals, and later biblical accounts, especially in Judges, indicate that the tribe of Benjamin was renowned for its martial prowess.

the spoils. The rare noun ʿad has been variously construed as “prey” (because of the wolf image) and “enemy,” and the compactness of the line even leaves doubt as to whether it is a noun and not an adverb (revocalizing ʿad as ʿod, “still”). But both its sole other occurrence in the Bible (Isaiah 33:23) and the poetic parallelism argue for the sense of spoils.

29. in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite. Jacob in his last words to his sons exhibits an elaborate consciousness of the legal transaction between his grandfather and Ephron the Hittite. Like the account of the purchase in chapter 25, he emphasizes the previous owner, the exact location of the property, and the fact that it was acquired as a permanent holding. Thus, at the end of Genesis, legal language is used to resume a great theme—that Abraham’s offspring are legitimately bound to the land God promised them, and that the descent into Egypt is no more than a sojourn.